The Ecomm Analyst

Most stores spending on brand search are spending too much.

Brand search is paid ads on your own brand name. Someone types your brand into Google and you pay for the ad result above your free organic listing. The argument for it. Competitor conquesting, defending the SERP, controlling the message above the fold. The argument against it. You’re paying for traffic that was already coming to you.

The honest answer is that some brand search spend is incremental and some is not. The hard part is knowing the ratio.

This is one of the cleanest tests you can run in performance marketing, and it’s the test almost no one runs. Pause brand search for a week. Compare organic branded clicks and direct revenue against the prior period. If you’re a big enough store with enough daily volume, the answer pops out quickly. If you’re smaller, run it for two weeks and accept some noise.

Two things almost always happen. Organic branded clicks rise to partially fill the gap, recovering a meaningful share of what brand search was capturing. And total revenue from branded queries drops by less than your brand search spend, sometimes much less.

You can do this with platform data alone. But I prefer to run the test and watch it through ThoughtMetric, because ThoughtMetric applies the same attribution logic to organic search and direct traffic that it applies to paid. You can see whether the conversions that “disappeared” from paid actually showed up in organic or direct, or whether they really left.

The conclusion isn’t always to kill brand search. There are categories where competitors bid aggressively and your brand search defends real revenue. There are launches and PR moments where it earns its keep. But the default assumption that brand search is sacred is wrong, and the test to find out is something you can run this week.